External company hired by the Romanian liberals says that the plan originally sent to influencers to boost Nicolae Ciuca’s candidacy has been changed and calls for “necessary legal measures” after usurpation in favor of Călin Georgescu
The Romanian investigative newspaper snoop.ro found that the pro-Russian disinformation campaign that led to victory in the first round of the country’s presidential elections in November originated from a campaign initially launched by the center-right National Liberal Party (PLN). ) – which was part of the country’s last government coalition and whose presidential candidate, former Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca, came in fifth place.
On November 24, Georgescu, an independent nationalist candidate who was once affiliated with the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) – Romania’s main far-right party – leapt from relative obscurity to a contested first place in the presidential race.
The victory, according to the Romanian secret services, was largely thanks to a disinformation campaign similar to the operations that the Kremlin has carried out online in Ukraine and Moldova, which took place mainly on TikTok and which, as reported by snoop.ro this weekend, came from a campaign launched by a third-party company hired by PLN.
the Romanian Tax Authority discovered that the liberals paid influencers to have a campaign on TikTok based on a hashtag that ended up being usurped to benefit Georgescu’s candidacy. This campaign was initially managed by Kensington Communication, which already reacted to the snoop news in a statement.
“If the campaign was cloned or diverted in favor of one candidate or another, we ask the competent bodies to analyze the case and take the necessary legal measures”, wrote the company, guaranteeing that the original campaign plan sent to the influencers was changed.
The Romanian case involving suspicions of electoral interference via TikTok led the country’s Constitutional Court two days before the second contest, ordering that the process be resumed from scratch, which means that the Romanian electorate will only return to the polls to elect the its next President in two to three months.
These suspicions also led the European Commission to open a formal investigation into TikTok’s practices, namely the way the company manages the risks of interference in elections by state and non-state actors.
